Acclaimed cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt traveled to Burma in 2007 to capture moments of ordinary life during military rule. He has donated his work to the Human Rights Center’s efforts to uphold human rights in Burma and around the world. This photo is of a man painting Buddha’s lips, a coveted job.

Goldblatt, who has been nominated for two Academy Awards, is especially known for his work on Angels in America, The Help, and most recently Get On Up, the biographical drama about James Brown.

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In celebration of the Human Rights Center’s 20th birthday, we are sending you a photo a day from 10 world-class photographers. These photographers have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

To learn more about the photographs and the online auction, visit envisioninghumanrights.com or paddle8.com/auctions/hrc. The auction ends Monday!

During a Demonstration in Support of the MPLA, Angola, 1975Sebastião Salgado

Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1974, but immediately descended into a protracted civil war between nationalist movements involving widespread abuses of human rights. In this photo, Sebastião Salgado photographs a scene of children in the Angolan capital of Luanda, who are watching a demonstration of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA).

Writes Sebastião Salgado:
“I very much like to work on long-term projects….There is time for the photographer and the people in front of the camera to under­stand each other. There is time to go to a place and understand what is happening there. …When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.”

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In celebration of the Human Rights Center’s 20th birthday, we have been pleased to send you a photo a day from 10 world-class photographers. These photographers have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

The farmworkers movement that emerged in the 1960s campaigned to protect the rights of migrant farmers, who at the time comprised a largely invisible work force in the United States. Today migrant farmworkers continue to receive lower wages than almost any other labor group and are exposed to some of the poorest working conditions. Ken Light’s photographs examine the lives of farmworkers in California, Texas, and the deep South. In this photo, a man harvests onions in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

“We’ve become such a 24/7 moving world with a constant stream of news and sound and pictures,” writes Light. “And the wonderful thing of a still photograph is you get to linger, you get to stop, you get to look, you get to think, you get to react, and it is a very different experience. It’s interesting to think about Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” image, which I think is one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. It’s an image that has very deep, humanistic feelings and messages about the world and the Great Depression in the United States. And you begin to wonder, what if Lange had lived in a multimedia age? Would we have that iconic image? Would the image be different if the migrant mother was talking?”

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This photo will be purchased for the UC Berkeley School of Law by generous donors. We need to raise $500 more to place it permanently in the law school. Would you like to contribute? Email us at hrc@berkeley.edu.

In celebration of the Human Rights Center’s 20th birthday, we are posting a photo a day from 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

For centuries Bolivia’s Potosí mountain has been called the “mountain that eats men” because so many miners, including children, have lost their lives there. Today, thousands of children work in and around Bolivia’s mines, searching for trace amounts of silver and tin.

Writes Ferry:
“For over two hundred years, the Spanish colonizers forced more than three million Quechua Indians to work in Potosí’s Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), supplying nearly half of the world’s production of silver. Hundreds of thousands of miners have died there from disease, accidents, and brutality. Today, men are compelled to repeat the past, working themselves to death in the very mountain that was the tomb of their ancestors.”

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In recognition of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center is posting a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

Mimi Chakarova, a native of Bulgaria, spent 10 years investigating the world of sex trafficking in Europe and the Middle East to produce the documentary The Price of Sex. She says building relationships with the girls–even more than her skills as a photographer–was critical to telling their stories. In this photo, Cristina, a victim of sex trafficking at the age of 16, holds up an old family photograph.

“The young women I followed over seven years grew up in rural villages similar to my own,” writes Chakarova. “Under Communism, we secretly hungered for opportunities in the West and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we left hoping for a taste of capitalism. Many young women, however, lacked the skills and education to survive. Desperate to leave, they fell prey to traffickers who sold them to pimps to work in brothels and sex clubs.”

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In recognition of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center is posting a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s forces took control of Iraqi Kurdistan, killing thousands of Kurds and other minorities. Before entering the territory, the Iraqi air force dropped chemical weapons on scores of towns and villages. In this photo, a widow looks at the remains of family members found in a mass grave in the village of Koreme.

Following the first Gulf War, photographer Susan Meiselas accompanied a forensic team, led by Eric Stover and forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, to Iraqi Kurdistan to investigate atrocities and exhume mass graves. Evidence collected during the trip was used in the trials of Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali.”

“Working with a small group of Kurds, we excavated where the gravediggers remembered burying the dead,” writes Meiselas about the experience. “Meticulously, earth was shoveled and then brushed away by hand, until finally the skull of a male teenager appeared, bearing a cloth blindfold.” Meiselas was so moved by the trip, she later returned to Iraqi Kurdistan to research and publish Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, a chronicle of Kurdish life told through a mosaic of portraits, diaries, and artifacts.

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In celebration of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center is posting a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

Nearly 40 years after the height of the Cambodian conflict, landmines continue to kill and maim civilians of all ages. This weapon of mass destruction in slow motion has led to thousands of amputees in northwestern Cambodia.

The Human Rights Center’s Eric Stover and British deminer, Rae McGrath, conducted the first research on the social and medical consequences of landmines in Cambodia. Their work helped to launch the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which along with its director Jody Williams, won the Nobel Prize in 1997.

“When I began working in Cambodia in the early 1990s,” writes the Bangkok-based photographer Nic Dunlop, “I became obsessed with the problem of landmines and what they were doing to ordinary people. I took the pictures with a burning anger and desire to see these weapons outlawed.” Dunlop’s photographs helped galvanize public opposition to the production and distribution of landmines worldwide.

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In celebration of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center will share a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

During the 1980s Jean-Marie Simon documented the violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan army on largely indigenous populations in what was called a “scorched-earth” campaign. Over three decades some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. Simon photographed both brutality and beauty–often side by side.

Writes Jean-Marie Simon:
“In the early 1980s, I traveled throughout Guatemala at the height of President Ríos Montt’s “scorched-earth campaign” against indigenous communities suspected of sympathizing with the guerrillas. Most of my photographs depicted scenes of violence and destruction, but, occasionally, I paused to capture moments of ordinary life. The portrait of the Ixil schoolgirls was taken just after photographing the bullet-riddled corpses of four men suspected of being guerrillas at the local army garrison up the street. Dawn was taken in Nebaj, Quiche, during a trek over the mountains to Acul, a neighboring Ixil village where the Army had killed 46 men, separating them into groups called “Heaven” and “Hell.” Those who went to “Heaven” were forced to bury those who went to “Hell.” I took the photograph of a solemn feast day procession in Nebaj two years after the Army had subjugated that population into a choice of submission or death. Photographing moments of tranquility and amity in the midst of a civil war may seem pointless—I certainly thought so back in 1980. But I later realized that those same images stood as a stark counterpoint to the brutality of the Guatemalan conflict by honoring the poignancy and dignity of a people under siege.”

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In celebration of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center will post a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, ravaged northern Uganda from 1986 through 2009. The LRA abducted children to be soldiers and sex slaves, massacred villagers, and displaced more than 1.7 million people.

The LRA killed 65-year-old Rose Lakue’s husband, abducted her eldest son, and burned down her home.

Photographer Thomas Morley and HRC’s Eric Stover traveled to the Amida camp for the internally displaced and other camps in northern Uganda to document the violence. They interviewed and photographed survivors like Rose who were willing to tell their stories.

Writes Thomas Morley:
“Outside the Amida camp, under a stand of trees, I set up a wooden chair and sent a messenger inside to see if anyone was interested in having their photo taken. Over the next two days, to my utter surprise, dozens of women appeared in their best clothes, wearing what little jewelry they possessed. Younger women helped older women to sit under the trees, waiting, in turn, for me to take their pictures. I was awestruck and humbled by their quiet dignity and courage and by their determination not to be forgotten.”

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In celebration of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center will send you a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience. To learn more about the photographs and the online auction to benefit HRC’s work, visit envisioninghumanrights.com
or paddle8.com/auctions/hrc.

In Gilles Peress’s photograph “Forced Separation, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1993,” family members are forced to flee while others are left behind during a conflict marked by ethnic cleansing, rape, and mass killing. Eric Stover, the Human Rights Center’s faculty director, worked with Peress during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and its aftermath. This photo, Stover says, captures the anguish of families being torn apart and the uncertainty of not knowing whether it is safer to stay or to go.

Gilles Peress raises the dilemma of human rights photography:

“I keep asking myself the fundamental question: Can human rights photography, like 18th century novels, be a vehicle for empathy? Can photographs motivate viewers to engage with human rights issues and bring about real change? As we know, badly used photography can be a vehicle for propaganda or emotional exploitation of the worst kind, and can ultimately desensitize viewers. Alternatively, if we accept the postmodernist argument mentioned above, we run the risk of photographs not being taken and entering a black hole of not seeing and a complete absence of consciousness. Which do you choose?”

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In celebration of our 20th birthday, the Human Rights Center will post a photo a day for 10 days. The photos come from the 10 world-class photographers who have generously shared their work with the center as part of the Envisioning Human Rights exhibit curated by Pamela Blotner at Berkeley Law this fall. Each photo touches on the center’s work with people who have suffered injustice and demonstrated great resilience. To learn more about the photographs and the online auction to benefit HRC’s work, visit envisioninghumanrights.com.

The Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law conducts research on war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights. The Human Rights Center Blog highlights current research and thinking on human rights and offers dispatches from faculty, staff, and fellows working around the world.